A Long Story About Sinks

So for the past two days I have been trying to get our sink fixed. It has been dripping steadily from the faucet. Cambria finds it hilarious, so here is my story. Monday morning I took apart the knobs that turn on our bathroom sink. Underneath are pieces that are crazy and have all sorts of rubber and plastic parts. I took it into Lowes and the teenage boy working there in plumbing looked at it and asked me what it was. I thought he should know but I explained it to him, and he sent me up the road to a plumbing specialist on Wall and 17th. I wait around for 20 minutes in line and when I get up to the desk, the "expert" there looks at it and says "what is it?" I kindly teach this expert a new class on sinks and where this came from in my sink. He proceeds to tell me he doesn't even know how to look it up, then tells me I may just have to buy a new faucet and handles just to start over with new parts. I leave, rather annoyed.

At home, I look up faucets that may look about the same since that is what Cambria wanted. After an hour or so online I find our faucet for $165.00. Then I found the model number and a parts list and called lowes and they told me they had a tool that could fix it easily. So that night I head down to Lowes again to find the guy that actually knew what the part was. I got there and he was wrong, but knew of a place that may know what to do.

The next day I head out to west Ogden on 24th street to the boondocks where I found Jerry's Plumbing Specialties. I walk in, hand the guy the part, he tells me the make and model just by looking at it, gets the parts, shows me how to fix it, i pay him, i walk out wishing this had happened on Monday so I didn't waste my whole day driving around finding a solution.

Once home, i fix it all, hook it up, and now a different part is slowly leaking water, so I use some teflon tape and seal off all the joints. Now it's not just leaking but shooting out little holes in my teflon tape. So i head out to the plumbing store again to get a replacement part that he showed me before. I get that part, come home, hook it up and it all works great, except for the leak that is pouring out of the water shut off valve. I decide to ignore it and leave the water off while I get the sink back together. I hooked up all the parts underneath, they worked fine, and I go to test them one last time before screwing on the handles to finish, and the handle gets stuck half way down for no apparent reason and is turning the wrong way. While attempting to pull off the now stuck handle, a bracket underneath the counter pops out of place, sending the handle and my arms flying upwards, breaking all the newly bought plastic parts underneath, and part of the old handle.

So after two days everything is ruined and my two days went to waste not to mention the parts that I bought that were now broken. I proceeded to take out my frustrations on the rest of the worthless faucet and handles which made me a bit happier for the time. Then I reverted to the new faucet I bought for $109.00 as a back up. in case all this happened.

I didn't have the right wrench for the new faucet so I headed down to Lowes AGAIN to get a set of wrenches. Buying new tools always makes me happy. Once home, the wrenches were still too small by what looked like thousandths of an inch! Well i decided i'd use what time I had left to take of the old drain and plug and replace it with the one that came with and matched the new faucet and handles. Our sink is mounted underneath the counter and is held up by four brackets. While trying to unscrew the old part, the sink proceeded to fall out of the bottom of our counter, hitting the water shut off valve, which turned it on and sprayed water all over me and the cabinet.

There I was, laying halfway in a bathroom cabinet, on my back holding up a falling sink with one hand and trying to reach the water shut off valve with the other. It was about then that I thought a plumber would have been a descent option considering the circumstances. Needless to say, I am a much humbler man.

Now our sink and bathroom are in disarray, Gary came by and glued some parts back up underneath so tomorrow we can put the sink back in place, removed all my old parts, and told me how to easily fix the shut off valve leak in two seconds. I admit that once the sink is in tomorrow, and once Gary leaves, I will be back underneath the sink, hooking up the new parts, trying not to break anything. I couldn't laugh at the time but I should have because I definitely can laugh at it now.

So the moral of the story: If you've never done it before, give yourself plenty of time and do it yourself if you want a good laugh.